The field of multimedia video advertising has undergone many recent improvements through technology known to the inventors that allows real-time computer-aided editing of digital video presentations. Methods, for example, have been developed for the purpose of inserting video overlays into selected video frames of an offered video. These overlays are used chiefly for the purpose of advertising, and the applications can implant images such as banner ads, independently moving image entities, text blocks, or other graphics displays into selected frame-sequences of a video presentation before or as it is broadcast to an end user.
A typical application for such inserted advertisements is inclusion in broadcast videos of sporting events. Because sporting events are often played at a stadium, a coliseum, or other type of predictable playing environment, information regarding the background of any video presentation covering an event at such locations may often be predictable and standardized. For example, a football game being played and recorded at a popular football stadium, wherein the camera positions are known or knowable, will have predictable regions in it's viewable background. Such regions include billboard spaces, walls of the arena, walls comprising the stands, scoreboards, areas of the field itself, and so on.
Semi-automated systems known to the inventors use the scheme described above, perhaps provided via access to a scale model of the location, and parameters of a video-camera system used to broadcast from the location, to compute the required information for implanting advertisements into the selected regions of a video. Advertisers then buy space in a video for insertion of their ads into the selected regions. Alternatively, one or more authoring stations may be used wherein authors may interact with real-time video feed to elect and designate regions useful for virtual ads.
The implanted ads are intended to appear to an end user watching the video presentation as if they are really in the stadium or game locale, such as on a fence or billboard, on a definable region of a playing field, on the side of a players dugout, and so forth. The ads described, because they are virtual ads, and may be selectively inserted, may also be selectively presented to selected audiences. Audiences viewing the same video broadcast in different geographic regions may then see different ads, advertising local businesses and products, and so on. In this way, advertising may be more flexible and local, at least, to a large viewing region.
The present inventors are aware of U.S. patents that allow ads to be inserted over fixed regions defined at a sporting event origination location. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,364,933, issued to Inventors Roy J. Rosser et al. on Nov. 23, 1993 teaches apparatus and methods for inserting virtual content in video at an origination point, but no way to incorporate ads at a downstream point in a manner that lets moving images in the video presentation to occlude the virtual added content to make the virtual content appear more real.
Further, U.S. Pat. No. 5,543,856, issued Aug. 6, 1996 to the same inventors teaches an “electronic billboard” system which allows downstream insertion of virtual content, but in a way that does not allow moving images to occlude the virtual added content to provide a realistic depiction.
Finally, U.S. Pat. No. 5,731,846 issued to inventor Haim Kreitman on Nov. 24, 1998 teaches further apparatus and methods for implantation of virtual content, but does not teach a method for implanting virtual content by testing pixels in a primary video stream in a designated candidate region, and displaying broadcast or virtual alternative pixels in a manner to make the virtual content occludable by moving images in the primary stream. There is no teaching in these patents to any method or apparatus for rendering virtual ads that will appear as though they really exist on the infrastructure at the origination location, by allowing moving images in successive frames to occlude portions of the virtual ads.
What is clearly needed is a method and apparatus that allows virtual ads to be implemented at a user's premise in a manner such that the ads may be more selective, providing additional granularity in tailoring to selected audiences, and may be based on a variety of criteria, such as demographics. In addition, it is needed that such a system be capable of implementing ads such that they may also share the same frame-sequence and space as real-time images without visual conflict for end users. That is, the ads need to appear even more as though they are real phenomena on the areas they appear to occupy in the broadcast video presentation.